Time Fork

 

Clues were everywhere. It was obvious that Stan wouldn’t vanish completely if he wasn’t rescued from the timeline he was on. Bits of writing, posts, illustrations and memories persisted. Too much Time Travel to his time period had destabilized things, and he was hard to find after a certain critical point.

What that point was, and what caused it were kicked down the line as various stopgap fixes seemed to hold. It was generally understood that Stan should be evacuated to the safe timeline, then brought back later to help people on the other side of the planet.

However, whenever they tried to get him into the sleep cycle that would facilitate a move, he managed to mentally avoid a complete transfer. Some echo of his self would be dragged to the other timeline, thank everyone, say that things weren’t ready, and vanish.

Rather than escape from the original timeline, over-prepare and double back, Stan wanted to be a beacon for everyone else coming back. The plans in his mind went above and beyond what most people had envisioned. As well, his balance was a single moment, rather than a complex web of routine and comfortable places.

The narrative for the events was well known, but what happened to who, and in what order, could have some unpredictably flexibility. That was a problem, even with time travel, people always tended to assume that everyone had the same experiences in the same way. Few took things to the logical extreme as much as Stan did.

While most assumed a linear extrapolation of current events in Stan’s time would be enough to satisfy the condition for a major shift, Stan thought otherwise. The obstacles preventing most people from getting a fair warning of the events to come where too entrenched and only realized by most people after a while. That lead them to want to double back and warn people more dramatically.

It would shift the timeline from what they remembered, though they had a thousand years buffer to fall back on. They had plans for avoiding their past selves, but nothing for integrating someone like Stan into the timeline. Most assumed the buffer time was necessary foundation for dealing with large shifts, but there were other ways.

So far, things were mostly experimented on in offshoots of the main timeline, possible futures that only had vague interactions that with the main series of events. Enough for people to dream out the outcomes in lucid dreams that fooled most people – till they woke up for real.

In these night time scenarios Stan did his usual hyper-aware self – knowing what they were trying for and knowing it wasn’t as solid as it appeared. The older folks had thought the training was for Stan to catch up, but it was really for them. Confidence enough to start altering things without the safeties on.

In truth, there was a deeper layer of stability to things, even with the usual guidelines exceeded. Real actions from the future still barely effected most people’s dreams – Stan being the major exception. His attuning to the changes had left a window to his environment more malleable than others. Random bit of interacting bled through and left a mark on the real world. Nothing major, but odd songs and AI weirdness shifted slightly as different random elements resulted from the interactions.

It was enough to triangulate things, and work out more of the science behind the workings of the so far, miraculous, influences. A message sifted through the Stan paradox. “I don’t need your wings to fly” his future self remembering a new detail hundreds of years after the innocuous event.

The implication was that he didn’t need to be swept up and drifted down in a large wave like everyone else was. He could wait until things were more discrete and precise. It would leave him as an anomaly in the greater pattern. Never quite fitting in as the largest shift in his life would be relatively unique.

That meant he could help others who were saved in the second wave integrate more easily. In effect being a bridge between those who left in the first movement and the more individualized rescues that followed.

They had to be isolated somewhat from the those in the first wave as they couldn’t be distracted by their failure to reach them the first time through, and to work up to a return. Time would have to fork.

Two different timelines, existing side by side, but both being equally real. One would take the longer amount of time, and the other would be an accelerated course. The latter would join the first again in an eleventh hour surprise.

"Missio - Underground - Metric Radio"